A black conservative's place for independent thinking and common sense -- A little oasis for those who got caught up in the momentum of the civil rights movement, but failed to discern the false from the true

Thursday, September 17, 2009

It's being called the capital of "Eurabia" these days. It used to be known as Rotterdam, Holland's most important port city. When former professor and writer Pim Fortuyn, leader of a newly formed political party, took steps to organize around the issue of the masses of Muslim immigrants coming from the Middle East, who were beginning to overwhelm the city, he was denounced by the good, white folks of Holland as a racist and a xenophobe. He was author of the book, Against the Islamisation of Our Culture. After his murder in 2002, and as the Muslim invasion continued unabated, some of those good, white folks began to look around them, to discover that Fortuyn had been more a saint than a devil.This year, even the fiercely politically correct Economist magazine is speaking of Rotterdam as a "Eurabian nightmare." Burkas and chadors fill the streets, and endless numbers of mosques, of taller and taller construction, dominate the city's skyline.

As Muslims enter politics, they join City Councils and even become Mayors of cities, as has happened in Rotterdam. In this way, traditional Western customs and laws are abridged or revamped. Muslim sharia law is intruded into the court system and other institutions. This seems incredulous, but it is true.

The Dutch have long been proud of their tolerance and acceptance of all forms of "cultural diversity." Yet, who could have imagined, just a decade ago, that citizens of a free European nation would face a mortal threat to their own distinctive culture and identity? In 2004, after film director Theo Van Gogh was knifed and shot to death on a street in Amsterdam, it was learned that certain politicians, who had voiced criticism against the activities of particular mosques, also had been targeted for death. Among them was Parliament member, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, the woman who had written the script for Van Gogh's critical film on Islam and a "heretic" who had renounced the religion. She faced so many death threats, that she finally fled the country.

Sandro Magister of Chiesa News says of Rotterdam: "Here, entire neighborhoods look as if they have been lifted from the Middle East." In an article, "In the Casbah of Rotterdam," Giulio Meotti quotes newspaper columnist Bart Jan Spruyt,

"We have ended up creating a parallel society. The Muslims are in the majority in many neighborhoods, and are asking for sharia. This isn't Holland anymore. Our use of freedom has turned back against us, it is a process of self-Islamization."

Some of the native population are coping with the social changes in a predictable manner, by adapting to the ways of the foreigners. No longer expecting Muslims to adapt to their country's customs, dedicated white multiculturalists rationalize reasons to capitulate to these people who have come to plant their civilization, even to the official acceptance of sharia law.

For centuries, Europeans had a visceral understanding of the fundamental fact that when Islam comes, it comes to supplant, to put down its own roots, its unique system of discipline and laws. It does not come to be absorbed into foreign civilizations.

What happens to a Western country's secular law system, to which all citizens are bound, when you allow multiple legal systems, for the sake of a religious minority, to operate behind closed doors? What happens when what was once permitted to operate in an informal manner is declared official and acceptable to the established government? And what, indeed, happens to those Muslims who were hoping for a diminution in sharia's reach, those who fled Muslim societies to escape its grim and austere injunctions?

Meotti tells of the exasperation of journalist Sylvain Ephimenco, a resident of Rotterdam:

I, who used to be on the left but am no longer anything, I say we've reached the limit. I feel the ideals of the Enlightenment have been betrayed with this voluntary apartheid, in my heart I feel the death of the ideals of the equality of men and women, and freedom of expression. Here the left is conformist, and the right has the better answer to insane multiculturalism."

Holland is the land of the intrepid Geert Wilders, head of the conservative Dutch Freedom Party and a member of Parliament, who came close to being prosecuted in Dutch courts for making "anti-Islamic" statements, and for producing a film (entitled Fitna), which depicts the violent side of Islam.

For years, Wilders has had to live under police protection, and has probably received more death threats than any other Dutch citizen. In June, he publicly directed a set of questions to Holland's central government. Among the eight questions were these:

Do you share our view that sharia law does not coincide with our democratic values and freedoms ... ?

Are there in the Netherlands any conflicts being settled, by imams or others in or outside mosques, based on sharia law?

How do you feel about the fact that Dutch law is being undermined by Muslims ... ?

In typical fashion, the good multiculturalists castigated Wilders for his "provocative" action.

Holland's story echoes throughout Europe. In some cases, violence is not confined to the murder of a targeted prominent figure. Sometimes, violence between native residents and Muslim immigrants reaches the streets. In Denmark, for example, over the past couple of years, Danish bikers have clashed with immigrant groups, with growing frequency. The typical result of a street battle is heavy-handed punishment by the police of the Danes, as opposed to a lighter touch when dealing with Muslim lawbreakers. An account by a blogger explains why:

A government and EU strategy puts great restrictions on the police when dealing with immigrants and immigrant gangs. There always are the accusations of "racism," and the muslim gangs are also feared much more than the bikers, when it comes to their threats to harm individual police officers or their families. Many policemen whose identities are known by the immigrant gangs, would rather not have their house torched or their loved ones attacked by the invaders who have taken their extremely violent mentality with them straight from the Middle East.

Even the police live in fear, an emotion that guides how the Danish authorities deal with these masses. High officials strive not to have to rule on cases involving strife with Muslims, for fear of their families' safety.

And, of course, the mainstream media, as it does throughout Europe and in the United States, reinforces the benign image of the "oppressed" immigrant, condemning belligerent Danes as "hatemongers" and bigots.

And England? What's there to say about England other than report that, as of a couple of months ago, there were 85 Muslim sharia courts ruling on the tight little island. Read about it for yourself, here and here. England is lost.

No, this isn't Holland anymore. And it isn't Belgium anymore. And it certainly isn't Sweden anymore.

America, meet your future.

•

Related

"A few hardline [Muslim] leaders would like it [sharia law] to be taken even further. One told me that Britain should adopt sharia punishments such as stoning and the chopping off of hands to reduce violent crime." - Read the story here

Thursday, September 10, 2009

They're going after Pat Buchanan again. Nothing makes the political Right and Left angrier than the suggestion that their Holy Crusade that took place in the middle of the 20th century, dubbed "World War II," brought no significant improvements either to Europe or to the United States. Stand back and wait for the invectives to fly, if ever you dare to point out that the U.S. had no more reason to intervene in this war than we had to interfere in that century's preceding European carnage. Over time, it has become acceptable to dissect the blunders and schemes that led to World War I, and our intervention in it. But be ready for hell to break loose, if you insist that even more pernicious were the blunders and schemes that resulted in U.S. intervention in Europe's second needless slaughter.

About this period, devotees of the "greatest generation" will proudly tell you,"This was the time when we all came together as One Nation." What a hell of a way to engage national bonding. Is this why we stay at war, in the hope that those wonderful, good old days might somehow be replicated, thus uniting this multicultural, boiling stewpot we now have going on here? Yes, maybe if we try another war, and yet another war, we can finally bring us all together – just like in those magic days of the Big WW2.

Buchanan set off the first storm with the publication of his provocative book, Churchill, Hitler, and the Unnecessary War. In it, he makes the case that colossal failures of judgement and diplomatic gaffes were responsible for the ensuing catastrophe. But for this bungling, Hitler would have continued to look eastward, Buchanan asserts, since his real goal was to take on Stalin and the Soviet Union. It was Russia that was in Hitler's sights for the expansion of German territory and power. War with the Western nations was neither desired nor inevitable.

One day President Roosevelt told me that he was asking publicly for suggestions about what the war should be called. I said at once, "The Unnecessary War." There never was a war more easy to stop than that which has just wrecked what was left of the world from the previous struggle.

That, from Churchill himself.

Recently, Buchanan tripped wires again with a column that essentially makes the same exposure of Churchill's destructive role, in addition to claiming that Hitler did not want to go to war with Britain. This time, Buchanan is denounced from the usual quarters as a "Hitler apologist," among the nicer epithets. Don't mess with our sacred World War Two, and don't criticize the leaders we have turned into gods.

Buchanan is in agreement with others who believe that, were it not for lack of insight and comprehension on the part of self-deluded Western leaders, the circumstances that led to the savage war, which resulted in the homicidal bombing of civilians, the Holocaust, and Britain's ultimate collapse, would never have come about.

Love of this war has resulted in a cult-like mindset. Almost every U.S. encounter abroad has an analogy to events in WWII. Buchanan believes that it is this 60-year-old cult (which he deems the "Churchill cult") that is responsible for our present calamity of perpetual war. In his book, he writes:

To this cult, defiance anywhere of U.S. hegemony, resistance anywhere to U.S. power becomes another 1938. Every adversary is "a new Hitler," every proposal to avert war "another Munich."

Slobodian Milosevic, a party apparatchik who had presided over the disintegration of Yugoslavia – losing Slovenia, Croatia, Macedonia, and Bosnia – becomes "the Hitler of the Balkans" for holding Serbia's cradle province of Kosovo.

Saddam Hussein, whose army was routed in one hundred hours in 1991 and who had not shot down a U.S. plane in 40,000 sorties, becomes "an Arab Hitler" about to roll up the Persian Gulf and threaten mankind with weapons of mass destruction. This mindset led us to launch a 78-day bombing campaign on Serbia, a nation that never attacked us, never threatened us, never wanted war with us, whose people had always befriended us.

Buchanan is relentless in his descriptions of the glorified Churchill's role in bringing down his own country. One reviewer is impressed by how well Buchanan "records again and again gross errors of judgment that helped propagate WWI, instigate WWII, facilitate Soviet expansion, and finally terminate the British Empire. It's a sobering account, to say the least, darn near the equivalent of saying Jesus erred on the Mount of Olives."

On the subject of open discussion of the war, Justin Raimondo observes that "dissent is simply not tolerated." Further, "Any challenge to the conventional wisdom is something close to a criminal act ... attacking U.S. entry into WWII is considered a 'hate crime.'"

About the term "good war" that has come to be affixed to this bloodbath, Robert Higgs calls it "an unfortunate turn of phrase, if ever there was one." Nothing good came out of this war unless you consider it "good" that the U.S. positioned itself to achieve permanent hegemony over the entire earth, denying its spiritual birth as a republic, to turn into a warrior nation whose imperial strivings now terrify most countries of the world. What came out of World War II, writes Raimondo, "was perpetual war and a thoroughly militarized American state that can't make a decent car but is geared to project force all over the world."

Paul Gottfried, in supporting Buchanan's depiction of the Allied leaders, writes, "It would be reasonable to point out that what Stalin devoured after the Second World War was what Churchill and FDR had helped put on his plate." If this "good war" had a clear political winner, writes Higgs, "it was Stalin." Higgs maintains that, "The prevailing American view of the war rests on a foundation of myths. The entire enterprise of understanding the war needs to be rebuilt from the ground up."

•

Speaking of this nation's birth, here is more ignored advice from the Founders themselves. (You might still remember those men whose Constitution is now a disregarded, antique document, that is held in contempt and consigned to the dustbin of irrelevance.)

From James Madison (Political Observations), we learn: "Of all the enemies of true liberty, war is, perhaps, the most to be dreaded, because it comprises and develops the germ of every other. ... No nation can preserve its freedom in the midst of continual warfare."

War carries the "germ" of every other enemy of freedom.

John Jay (Federalist Nos. 4 and 6) did not see leaders as being trustworthy initiators of war. He worried that some leaders will make war even "when their nations are to get nothing by it." He spoke of leaders harboring motives such as personal ambition, thirst for military glory and revenge for personal affronts. These and other motives can compel a leader "to engage in wars not sanctified by justice or the voice and interests of his people." Jay warned about a nation putting itself in situations that "invite hostility or insult," that could lead to "pretended" causes of war.

As an outspoken observer of human nature, Jay claimed that "Men are ambitious, vindictive, and rapacious," and avowed that republics, in practice, are just as addicted to war as monarchies. "Are not the former administered by men as well as the latter?" he so wisely asked. He believed that the same aversions and "desires of unjust acquisitions" affect nations as well as kings.

But, what did those antiquated, breeches-wearing Founders know?

•

End NoteThe perpetually exploited Iraq. The more things change, the more they stay the same. Here are two entries from the book, Human Smoke: The Beginnings of World War II, the End of Civilization, by Nicholson Baker:

Churchill's commandSome Iraqi troops gathered on a plateau near Fullujah, Iraq. It was May 1941. Churchill, in his bombproof map room, had his eyes now on the Middle East. Yugoslavia and Greece, set ablaze and then left in Nazi hands, were lost – but Axis forces, might yet swarm over from somewhere and capture Iraq's oil.

"Troops should be sent to Basra as fast as possible," Churchill wrote to General Ismay of the Chiefs of Staff. The Iraqi prime minister, Rashid Ali, sent word that he could not allow any more disembarkations of British troops until the troops already in Basra had moved on. Churchill ordered the landings to proceed. British civilians left Baghdad, seeking protection at the Royal Air force training base at Lake Habbaniya. They got on flying boats and flew to safety.

A highway of deathThe British flight instructors won their great battle. Retreating from the plateau, Iraqi troops made their way down the road toward Fallujah, where they met late-arriving reinforcements. The two groups stopped and began to compare notes. RAF planes spotted this troop concentration and turned the site into a highway of death: "A reinforcing column from Falluja was caught on the road and destroyed by forty of our aircraft dispatched from Habbaniya for the purpose," Churchill wrote. When the "siege of Habbaniya," as he called it, was over on May 7, 1941, fifty-two British airmen were dead or critically wounded; four were in a state of mental collapse. The number of Iraqi dead was not known.

Then, for the last push to Baghdad, new equipment arrived. C.L. Sulzberger, the New York Times correspondent, reported that the Royal Air Force was using American-made Curtiss Tomahawk fighters and Glenn Martin 157 bombers to "harass" Rashid Ali's forces. There was word that Rashid had applied for a transit visa to Turkey. In the end, though, the Iraqi prime minister found his way to Persia, and British-friendly royals were reinstalled in the capital. Commander Smart, the overtaxed director of the flying school, had a breakdown; he was flown out, sedated, in a Douglas DC-2. Read more!

Wednesday, September 09, 2009

Writer Glenn Greenwald makes a chilling point. In spite of the notions on which this country was founded, the people's voice counts for nothing when it comes to constant warmaking. In fact, for America, war is the "normal state of affairs," and remains so, no matter what the people's choice in the polls might show.At one time, at least our leaders paid lip service to the concept that wars should only be waged as a defensive action. Today, they no longer bother to do that. Nor do they bother to pretend that war, bombing, and occupation of other countries is necessary to protect the United States.

Greenwald claims that the fact that "a large majority of Americans oppose a war has little effect -- none, actually -- on whether the war will continue. Like so much of what happens in Washington, the National Security State and machinery of Endless War doesn't need citizen support. It continues and strengthens itself without it. That's because the most powerful factions in Washington -- the permanent military and intelligence class, both public and private -- would not permit an end to, or even a serious reduction of, America's militarized character. It's what they feed on. It's the source of their wealth and power."

And here's why the people's voice does not count: "As long as a President is waging wars and trying to control the world through military force, he desperately needs the CIA, the military, the entire National Security State apparatus, and thus cannot 'change' policies of secrecy, civil liberties, privacy and the like -- even if he wanted to. That's why being in a state of endless war doesn't merely raise discrete questions of this policy or that; it changes the character of the nation."

And so, this fall, Americans who want to put an end to the continued violation of Afghanistan, will take to the streets to register their disapproval and outrage -- only to be ignored again. Read more!

The writer Camille Paglia, a liberal and Obama supporter, offers some tough criticism of her fellow libs, along with a scorching tongue-lashing to Republicans, those morally bankrupt preachers, also known as pseudo-conservatives. Here are excerpts from "Too late for Obama to turn it around?"

• • •

Why has the Democratic Party become so arrogantly detached from ordinary Americans? Though they claim to speak for the poor and dispossessed, Democrats have increasingly become the party of an upper-middle-class professional elite, top-heavy with journalists, academics and lawyers (one reason for the hypocritical absence of tort reform in the healthcare bills). Weirdly, given their worship of highly individualistic, secularized self-actualization, such professionals are as a whole amazingly credulous these days about big-government solutions to every social problem. They see no danger in expanding government authority and intrusive, wasteful bureaucracy. This is, I submit, a stunning turn away from the anti-authority and anti-establishment principles of authentic 1960s leftism. ...

I always thought that the Democratic Party is the freedom party -- but I must be living in the nostalgic past. Remember Bob Dylan's 1964 song "Chimes of Freedom," made famous by the Byrds? And here's Richie Havens electrifying the audience at Woodstock with "Freedom! Freedom!" Even Linda Ronstadt, in the 1967 song "A Different Drum," with the Stone Ponys, provided a soaring motto for that decade: "All I'm saying is I'm not ready/ For any person, place or thing/ To try and pull the reins in on me."

But affluent middle-class Democrats now seem to be complacently servile toward authority and automatically believe everything party leaders tell them. Why? Is it because the new professional class is a glossy product of generically institutionalized learning? Independent thought and logical analysis of argument are no longer taught. Elite education in the U.S. has become a frenetic assembly line of competitive college application to schools where ideological brainwashing is so pandemic that it's invisible. The top schools, from the Ivy League on down, promote "critical thinking," which sounds good but is in fact just a style of rote regurgitation of hackneyed approved terms ("racism, sexism, homophobia") when confronted with any social issue. The Democratic brain has been marinating so long in those clichés that it's positively pickled. ...

Having said all that about the failures of my own party, I am not about to let Republicans off the hook. What a backbiting mess the GOP is! It lacks even one credible voice of traditional moral values on the national stage and is addicted to sonorous pieties of pharisaical emptiness. Republican politicians sermonize about the sanctity of marriage while racking up divorces and sexual escapades by the truckload. They assail government overreach and yet support interference in women's control of their own bodies.

Advanced whack-a-mole is clearly needed for that yammering smarty-pants Newt Gingrich, who is always so very, very pleased with himself but has yet to produce a single enduring thought. The still inexplicably revered George W. Bush ballooned our national deficits like a drunken sailor and clumsily exacerbated the illegal immigration debate. And bizarrely, the hallucinatory Dick Cheney, a fake-testosterone addict who spooked Bush into a pointless war, continues to be lauded as presidential material.

Which brings us to Afghanistan: Let's get the hell out! While I vociferously opposed the incursion into Iraq, I was always strongly in favor of bombing the mountains of Afghanistan to smithereens in our search for Osama bin Laden and al-Qaida training camps. But committing our land forces to a long, open-ended mission to reshape the political future of that country has been a fool's errand from the start.

Every invader has been frustrated and eventually defeated by that maze-like mountain terrain, from Alexander the Great to the Soviet Union. In a larger sense, outsiders will never be able to fix the fate of the roiling peoples of the Near East and Greater Middle East, who have been disputing territorial borderlines and slaughtering each other for 5,000 years. There is too much lingering ethnic and sectarian acrimony for a tranquil solution to be possible for generations to come.

The presence of Western military forces merely inflames and prolongs the process and creates new militias of patriotic young radicals who hate us and want to take the war into our own cities. The technological West is too infatuated with easy fixes. But tribally based peoples think in terms of centuries and millennia. They know how to wait us out. Our presence in Afghanistan is not worth the price of any more American lives or treasure. Read more!

Tuesday, September 08, 2009

With the current administrators of the Department of Justice promising to beef up its focus on civil rights complaints, thereby spotlighting pending cases tied to racial grievances, and the call for the return of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights back to the domain of the liberals, along with the potential passage of the Emmett Till Unsolved Civil Rights Crime Act, what might these three cases infer for the future of race relations in this country? Might there be less racial hostility or more of it? Do these signs of the times tell us that we are definitely not living in that "post-racial" era promised by Barack Obama's enthusiastic acolytes during the 2008 election? [See "The end of identity politics?"] Is it more likely that we can expect a continued emphasis on ethnic victimology?

Following is an updated version of a section originally part of our post, "Black Crime."

• • •

In 2007, bills were introduced into both the House of Representatives and the Senate “to provide for the investigation of certain unsolved crimes, and for other purposes.” This potential law is called the Emmett Till Unsolved Civil Rights Crime Act (H.R. 923 and S.535).

The bill's sponsors, led by Rep. John Lewis, aim to set up an “Investigative Office” in the civil rights units of both the Department of Justice and the FBI, granting authority to agents to plow through old alleged crimes that were committed against blacks prior to December 31, 1969, supposedly during what is known as the “civil rights” period.

On the one hand, a general statement within the bill claims that said past crimes had to result in a “death.” On the other hand, the stated purpose in the introduction of the bill says nothing about death, and adds the vague wording, “and for other purposes,” implying that the law could be used as a catch-all for various kinds of infractions of the law that we cannot conceive of at the moment.

The question is, if these seekers of belated "justice" do not find enough murders to prosecute, will they seek to ferret out half-century old alleged assaults, robberies, larcenies? Might they go back, find an atrocity that had occurred on which a town's white police force failed to act, and today make that town's government complicit and hold it accountable? Does the “civil rights” period mentioned mean only the recent past, i.e., 1950s through 1960s? The use of the term “civil rights” goes back a long way.

If this law is passed, we can expect the country to be subjected to yet more black victimology, as the media grooves on the resurrection of old crimes that can unnecessarily stir up animosities. Of course, it's only whites who are bound to come out on the short end of the stick. If a hunted suspect of an old crime is found, then what? As with the septuagenarians and octogenarians accused of Nazi war crimes, can we expect the media to delight in sending us images of sick, elderly men, handcuffed and forced to do the perp walk?

So much of the details of such prior events are lost in the mists of time and in dimmed, undependable memories, but no matter. There's bound to be some stories out there that can be milked and exploited. During this period when so many crimes committed by blacks against whites are virtually ignored or under-reported by the media, or rationalized away as justifiable, blacks are being primed to dig up crimes from the past, and make somebody pay.

There are other questions about this law. Just as Congress gradually extended the power of the EEOC to implement the 1964 Civil Rights Act, inadvertently giving us affirmative action and quotas, so too might the Emmett Till law be modified or reinterpreted, in order to carry out agendas not explicitly cited in the original bill. Just as the Brown vs. Board of Education court decision was “misinterpreted” to eventually justify forced busing and the crippling of school systems around the country, so, too, this law, if passed, could bring unexpected consequences.

Might we be looking at a law that opens the door to crafty mischief makers, to plod through a couple of centuries worth of real and imagined “crimes?” While whites are urged not to make a fuss about black-on-white crimes, black leaders are gearing up, or as they put it, “beefing up investigations” of old crimes against blacks, for what might conceivably be ad infinitum.

Loss of the Issues & Views website

Due to the fact that the owners of the company that has hosted Issues & Views - The Website, since its creation in 1997, have decided to host only sites in Alaska, the website linked to this blog is probably lost.

Issues & Views - The Website (www.issues-views.com) contained hundreds of articles first printed in the hard copy Issues & Views newsletter (1983 through 2002), along with newer articles composed in the 1990s.

Although the former host has re-directed clicks to the website to this blog, it does not appear that there will be any rescue of the website's files or database. For this reason, surfers looking for issues-views.com are landing on this blog. (The website is currently being cached by Google.)

I have learned that an archived version of the website is available on Wayback Machine. Unfortunately, this last capture was performed in 2008, so it lacks certain minor deletions and editing done in 2009 and 2010. However, anyone searching for a particular article should be able to find it there.

- Elizabeth (issues@issues.cnc.net)

Racism is not "sin"

Over the years, as whites have worked to defend themselves against the charge of "racism," they have validated this slur by giving it greater importance than it deserves, and thereby helped to institutionalize it as the world's greatest "sin." As to genuine sin, harboring negative thoughts concerning some group is much further down the list of human deficiencies than bombing Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Dresden and Hamburg, or hacking to death with machetes the men, women and children of an enemy tribe. Now, those are sins! Seeking to force "diversity" down the throats of an unreceptive segment of society is the religious mission of rabid, agenda-driven ideologues. None of this apparent concern for "social justice" has ever been about virtue. It's about power.

•

Jacobs and Potter on the un-American nature of "hate crime" legislation.